How Exactly Does Starmer Intend to Reform the NHS?

I’m going to have to do a bit more digging on this, because I think I might be missing something. Yesterday Starmer and Wes Streeting announced that if Labour is elected, they’ll reform the NHS. Starmer has been saying for a very long time that the health service is in an existential crisis and that radical reform is required in order to save it. I think he’s absolutely right about this, especially as Sunak wants even more of it privatised as he deludedly thinks this has worked so well, and former Health Secretary Sajid Javid wants to introduce a £20 charge for people seeing their doctor. I also remember Lord Warner back in the ‘teens suggesting that there should be some kind of additional private insurance scheme or tax or something levied to support the NHS. This was, of course, another step on the road to full privatisation, as was pointed out to Warner. Who subsequently left the Labour party. Starmer also announced that Labour would demand increased efficiency in the NHS with targets set to reduce waiting times. This is all good stuff, but I don’t recall any mention on the mainstream news about how exactly he was going to do all this. It should be done through re-nationalisation and the statements from my local Labour MP, Karin Smyth, certainly suggests that Labour’s committed to a nationalised NHS. But Labour has also said that in the short term they’ll use private healthcare to clear the waiting list. This sounds good, but I have a feeling that the arguments for privatising the NHS the Tories have been using recently included the same statement that they were going to use private healthcare to cut the backlog created by the Covid crisis. New Labour was as committed to privatisation as the Conservatives and went further in the privatisation of the NHS than the Tories had dared. I’m therefore at a loss how Starmer and Streeting plan to reform the NHS so that it again meets the needs of this country’s great working people, and whether it’ll still be nationalised at the end of it, whatever the impression Starmer wants to give about it now.

Will Starmer Protect the NHS from Privatisation by Sunak? Local MP Karin Smyth Responds

A week or so ago I wrote to Karin Smyth, the local MP for south Bristol, at the behest of one of the internet petitioning organisation. Rishi Sunak had stated that he intends to privatise more of the health service, as privatisation has worked so well. Which shows how ideologically deluded and completely removed from anything resembling reality he and the other Thatcherite privatisation maniacs are. The petitioning organisation asked its supporters to write to their MPs requesting them to block this. If your MP was Labour, then you were urged to ask them to write to them asking them to write to Starmer and request him to oppose the privatisation. Or say if he would oppose it. I got this response yesterday from Karin Smyth:

‘Dear David -,

Thank you for contacting me to raise concerns about NHS privatisation.

I know that many people are rightly concerned at the very serious pressures facing our NHS. Our health service is struggling and performance against many waiting time measures is at a record low: patients are waiting hours for ambulances to arrive, A&E departments are overstretched, and more than seven million people are waiting for treatment.

Ministers point to the impact of COVID-19. But we entered the pandemic with record NHS waiting lists and 100,000 staff vacancies.
We must build capacity in the NHS so that all patients who need it can be treated on time again. But I believe we have a responsibility in the short term to utilise spare capacity in the private sector to get through the current crisis and bring down NHS waiting lists. Nobody should be left languishing in serious pain, while those who can afford to, pay to go private. That is the two-tier healthcare system that I and my colleagues want to end.

In the long term, I want the NHS to be so good that people never have to go private.

Building an NHS fit for the future is one of Labour’s five key missions for government, reforming health and care services to speed up treatment, shift the focus of healthcare out of the hospital and into the community, and reduce health inequalities.

Paid for by ending the non-dom tax status regime, the plan will double the number of medical school places, create 10,000 extra nursing and midwifery clinical placements a year, train double the number of district nurses each year, and deliver 5,000 more health visitors.

Thank you once again for contacting me about this issue.

Yours sincerely,

Karin Smyth MP
Labour MP for Bristol South’

I thank her for her response and am convinced that she is sincere in her belief in the NHS and defence of it. But I don’t trust Starmer. Not after he’s broken every promise he’s ever made. I also remember how Blair constantly accused the Tories of priatising the NHS – rightly – but then went much further than them when he came to power. So much so that the Tories under Cameron pretended to be further left and opposed the hospital closures of Blair’s regime. Of course, that lasted right up until Cameron got his public school arse through the door of No. 10.

As a member of the Labour party, I hope Labour supporters will continue to vote Labour in the local elections today and we can get the Tories out, because they will make things worse if they’re returned to power. But I remain unconvinced that Starmer will be significantly better.

Starmer Sacked Scottish Labour Leader at Demands of Donors

I went to the online meeting last night on restoring Labour party democracy staged by Arise and the Labour left. I didn’t spend very long there, as sometimes I get too irate at what’s being said – not at the speakers, but at the problems they’re talking about. And the major problem facing democracy in the Labour party is Starmer. He and the NEC are doing everything they can to purge and silence socialists in the party. The most glaring example of this is his deselection of Jeremy Corbyn, a man whose position as party leader Starmer isn’t fit to fill. But there are other cases where he’s deselection sitting MPs and senior party officials over the heads of local constituency parties and the wishes of ordinary Labour party members. And one of the most blatant and toxic examples of this, after Corbyn, is his removal of someone Leonard as head of the Scottish Labour party.

Leonard had aroused right-wing ire by being too left. Even before his removal the NEC and the Labour right had been trying their damnedest to undermine him. The crunch finally came, however, when someone in the House of Lords and a group of Labour party donors told Starmer that they wanted him gone or they would take their money elsewhere. New Labour are corporatists, and when their masters in industry say ‘Jump!’, they say ‘How high?’ And Starmer duly got rid of Leonard and replaced him with someone more pliable.

This does not bode well for the future of the Health Service, as Stalin has among his advisers people from the private healthcare companies. He got touchy when asked about them, and declared that he wouldn’t answer questions on his advisors. Well, the time is long past when we should be questioning politicians on the help they’re getting from the private sector. When Blair slithered into power he was surrounded by a host of lobbyists and advisors from private healthcare companies and even American private prisons, all keen to influence his government. And the result was over a decade of corporatist government that left the people of this country worse off but made Blair and his backers rich. George Monbiot describes this sorry state in his book Captive State, and Bremner and the Long Johns tore into Blair and his corporate cronies in their book You Are Here.

Corporatism is a major problem in America. It’s led to an erosion of trust in politicians, as the majority of Americans believe that once they get elected, their politicos will abandon their election platforms to do what their corporate backers want. A Harvard study declared that because of this, America was no longer a proper democracy but a corporate oligarchy. And some conservatives were also outraged at it. A Republican businessman in California wanted to have a law passed stipulating that politicians gaining from corporate donations should wear the badges of the companies funding them, like racing car drivers and other sportsmen. The major problem in America is a judgement in the 1980s stating that corporate donations are free speech, and thus permissible under the law. Over here it seems to be pretty much a straightforward reaction by industry to the unions funding the Labour party. And just as this corporatism is undermining democracy in the Labour party, it also caused people to leave the Tories. Because the Tory grassroots felt their concerns were being ignored in favour of the corporate big boys and girls.

Starmer is just going to drag us back to the corporate sleaze of the Blair years.

There might be some hope, though. One of the speakers, Nabeela Mowlana, pointed out that Starmer hadn’t killed young people’s enthusiasm for socialism and Corbyn’s and his vision. And there was Blair’s spectacular failure when he tried to stop Red Ken standing as mayor of London. The man Private Eye dubs ‘Leninspart’ stood as an independent, and beat Blair’s candidate.

Starmer is not just destroying democracy in the Labour party, he’s also destroying the wider hopes of the British people, the majority of whom backed Corbyn’s policies for a mixed economy and strong welfare state. We do need to organise and resist him.

Nearly Half of the British People Are Right: Starmer Has No Vision

Looking along the headlines of the papers this morning, I noticed that one of the right-wing rags had put on their front page a story that nearly half of the British public don’t believe that Starmer has a vision. I think they’re right. He doesn’t. Every policy he’s ever supported he’s rejected at a later date. He has said that he intends to reform the NHS, which sort of sounds like he’s going to protect it from privatisation, but this is qualified with talk of using private hospitals and medical care to shift the backlog. And the Blairites’ record on the NHS is of privatisation, not nationalisation. There’s also some talk about using money from a windfall tax on the energy companies to lower energy prices or something, but to me it all sounds very half-hearted and heavily qualified. Unlike Corbyn, there is no grand, inspiring vision that packs out halls and public spaces. His tactic against the Tories seems to have been very much one of simply waiting until they made the mistakes that have now made them massively unpopular.

Which fits the Blairite strategy. Blair took over wholesale Tory attitudes on the welfare state, privatisation and immigration. His policies were partly those discarded by the Tories. They had rejected a report on the reform of the civil service or something by Anderson Consulting. So Blair fished it out of the bin and made it Tory policy. He took over Major’s Private Finance Initiative, and expanded it. In education, he took over Maggie Thatcher’s City Academies scheme, which was actually being wound up because it was a failure, and relaunched it as the new academies. No wonder Thatcher declared that he and New Labour were her greatest achievement.

Instead of any kind of vision, New Labour relied on triangulation, looking at what would go down well with swing voters in key constituencies and then appealing to them. All the while inanely chanting that things could only get better. And instead of drawing on genuine Labour traditions and ideology, Blair instead seems to have taken his ideas from whatever Murdoch wanted at the moment. He’d also have liked to have appealed to the Heil, but they stuck to their guns and remained a Tory rag. Under Blair, people left the Labour party in droves, driven away by the Thatcherism, control freakery and managerialism that replaced spontaneity with heavily stage-managed, scripted performances. Blair and Brown’s attitude seemed to be to see what the Tories were doing, and then announce that if you elected them, they’d do it better.

And I think this is pretty true of Starmer’s regime in the Labour party. He doesn’t have a vision, just a desire to rule and copy the Tories.

Public Satisfaction with NHS at Lowest Ever

I’m sure you’ve also seen this on the news. According to a new poll, public satisfaction with the NHS is at is lowest since people started being survey about it in the 1980s. The Tories must be delighted, as this is all very much engineered. Despite all the lies that they prize the NHS and that it’s in safe hands, they’ve been aching to privatise it since the Maggie Thatcher. So budgets have been cut, leading to the shortage of beds that proved disastrous during the Covid epidemic. Services have been privatised and outsourced, with the private healthcare companies also imposing cuts in order to keep profits up for their shareholders. Grotty Tory politicos have already started to demand outright privatisation and the levying of charges, despite the fact that the latter violates the fundamental ethos of the NHS that it should be free at the point of use. And I’ve no doubt that their mouthpieces in the media will get more outspoken in their demands for its privatisation. GB News’ Nana Akua has already posted any number of videos on YouTube demanding it, or something very like it.

What the Tories won’t like is that the public still support it. This is a major problem for those demanding it be sold off to private enterprise. You can find them online complaining about the public’s continued support and discussing ways that it should be broken. Labour should be out defending it, and I’m sure some Labour MPs are sincere when they say they will. But not Starmer. He’s a Blairite, and Blair did more to privatise the NHS than the Tories had dared. Moreover, Starmer has surrounded himself with American private healthcare firms as his advisors. When somebody asked him about it, he’s supposed to have snapped that he didn’t answer questions about his advisors. Which is a blatant dodge, if ever there was one.

I hope Labour does get in, because another bout of Tory government will destroy this country. But if they do, I definitely want Starmer held to account and continually pressured to retain and expand the NHS. With no lies or evasions countenanced.

We Own It Petition to the Labour Party to Have the NHS Renationalised

Here’s another petition against the privatisation of the NHS, this time from pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation We Own It. They are naturally outraged that privatisation, according to a study by Cambridge university, has resulted in 500+ preventable deaths. They believe the Labour party is moving in the right direction, as Wes Streeting last week in an interview with New Statesman, said the party was considering moving more services back in house. But they want to press the point home, and so wish to present a petition to the party’s policy organisation demanding its complete renationalisation. They are also planning a major campaign next year against the health service’s privatisation.

I’ve signed the petition, and if you feel like me about this issue, please do so as well.

‘Dear David,

Last week Wes Streeting made his strongest case yet against NHS outsourcing.

He only did this after you took action to say NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.

Now we want to push Labour to go even further and make reinstating the NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE their official policy.

We are making a submission to Labour’s policy-making body this Friday, 17th March. We want you to add your voice to it so they know thousands of us want this.

You have just 72 hours left – Take just 2 mins to add your name to call for a fully public NHS

For the next 18 months, our message on the NHS is going to be really simple: NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.

As you know, a recent Oxford University study has linked the preventable deaths of 557 people to the outsourcing of NHS services.

We want to hammer that message into every home in the country so that at the next election pro-privatisation politicians are forced to explain to voters why they are happy to put up with deaths just so private companies make a profit.

We will push all parties to reinstate our NHS as a fully public service. We are independent of all political parties and we lobby all of them.

But it is really important to focus on Labour because they currently have the best chance of winning the next election.

So we are going to ramp up the pressure on them month by month not just to make sure they sign up to this policy before the next election, but also to make sure they actually implement it if they win.

Add your name to call for a fully public NHS

The public is on your side on this. Two-thirds of them, according to our latest polling, are concerned about NHS outsourcing and want our NHS reinstated as a fully public service.

Going by Wes Streeting’s tune last week, Labour has come a long way on this issue. And they look like they are now going in the right direction.

But they still have a long way to go to pledging to reinstate our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE.

That is why we are making a submission to their policy-making body – the National Policy Forum – to outline the evidence and demand they make kicking greedy private companies out of our NHS their policy.

If thousands of people add their voices to our submission, they will know that this is not just one organisation’s demand – reinstating our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE is backed by so many people.

Add your name to call for a fully public NHS

The NHS is a devolved matter, which means that our submission is only about the NHS in England. But we all know that Labour in England has a strong influence on Labour in all the other nations.

If Labour in England pledges to reinstate our NHS as a fully public service, Labour in the other nations will likely follow.

So your voice is really important whether you live in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

We know that England is not alone in seeing the effects of private companies making profits from our healthcare.

Just today, we’ve seen a report by the Scotland Herald showing that private healthcare companies with links to UK politicians are charging Scots £250 to see a doctor for 15 minutes.

We know the situations in Wales and Northern Ireland are very similar.

The Labour Party taking a strong stance and pledging to reinstate our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE would send a strong message to all the nations.

We’re sending our submission on Friday – sign now to add your voice

Thank you so much for your commitment to the fight to protect our NHS and put pro-privatisation politicians under pressure.

Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team

Reply from Local Bristol MP to My Offer of Book against NHS Privatisation

A few weeks ago I wrote to my local MP for Bristol South, Karin Smyth, offering her copies of my self-published book and pamphlets against NHS Privatisation. I received this reply from her yesterday.

‘Dear David Sivier

Thank you for contacting me to raise concerns about NHS privatisation.

We must build capacity in the NHS so that all patients who need it can be treated on time again. But I believe we have a responsibility in the short term to utilise spare capacity in the private sector to get through the current crisis and bring down NHS waiting lists. Nobody should be left languishing in serious pain, while those who can afford to, pay to go private. That is the two-tier healthcare system that we need to end.

In the long term, I want the NHS to be so good that people never have to go private. There is, in my view, an incompatibility between the aims of private companies and the aims of the NHS. A company’s primary concern is its shareholders, not the patients.

Building an NHS fit for the future is one of Labour’s five key missions for government, reforming health and care services to speed up treatment, shifting the focus of healthcare out of the hospital and into the community, and reduce health inequalities.

Paid for by ending the non-dom tax status regime, the plan will double the number of medical school places, create 10,000 extra nursing and midwifery clinical placements a year, train double the number of district nurses each year, and deliver 5,000 more health visitors.

Thank you once again for contacting me about this issue.

Yours sincerely,

Karin Smyth MP
Labour MP for Bristol South’

I very much support her comments about making the NHS so good that no-one would want to go private and the incompatibility between private enterprise and the aims of the NHS. I also fully support Labour’s proposal to increase the training of NHS nurses and midwives, paid for by ending the non-dom tax status. If that goes through, that will really hurt the proprietor of the Heil, who has inherited it from his wretched father but unlike him shows no sign of living in France.

However, I do not trust Keir Starmer and MPs like Wes Streeting to honour it. I hope I will be proved wrong. In the meantime, there is no chance of reversing privatisation with the Tories in power.

Get them out!

Robert Reich: America’s Private Healthcare System Is Broken and Medicare for All Is Inevitable

Robert Reich is an American left-wing political commenter and blogger. I think he was an official in one of the Democrat administrations, either Clinton or Obama. But today he posted a message stating that America’s healthcare system was so broken that it’s only a matter of time before Medicare for All is introduced. But, he asks, how many people are going to suffer before this happens?

‘Our healthcare system is a catastrophe. Eventually, we will implement Medicare for All. The question is how much corporate greed and unnecessary suffering we will be forced to endure until that happens.’

‘

I’m sure this is absolutely true. One of my friends trained as a doctor, and he told me that some American hospitals are keeping afloat purely because of government subsidies. But you obviously aren’t going to be told this by the Tories and Blairite Labour, who are determined to promote the lie that private healthcare is more efficient and affordable. A few years ago the American healthcare system almost broke down completely because of demand.

This may be part of the reason why American private healthcare giants like Unum and the rest have been trying to get into Britain’s NHS since they started lobbying Blair in the late 90s.

Bernie was right to demand Medicare for All. The head of the American Green party was a gynaecologist, and she wanted Medicare for All as part of her concern for women’s health. Jeremy Corbyn was right to demand the renationalisation of the health service.

Believe them, not Tory/Blairite lies.

My Emails to My Local Labour Party Asking Them If They Want Copies of My Books Against NHS Privatisation

I’m still trying to get people interested in my books attacking the privatisation of the NHS. A few days ago I sent this email to my local Labour party, Bristol South, asking if they would be interested in receiving copies of them.

‘Dear ,

Thank you for the email notifying me of February’s meeting next week. I am contacting you because, like so many other people, I am greatly concerned about the state of the health service and the threat of privatisation. This process has been going on for forty years since Margaret Thatcher, and in my opinion is responsible for the much of the dreadful state it’s now in. A few years ago I wrote a couple of self-published pieces of literature against it. One is a ten-page pamphlet and the other is a small book. I would very much like to know if the party would like to receive copies, which they could use for reference and for helping others to understand this threat.

Here is a description of the books.

‘Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.

This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.’

Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.

The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.’

Yours with best wishes,

David Sivier’

I haven’t received a reply so far. I’ll let you all know if I get one.

Simon Webb Now Pushing NHS Privatisation

With the NHS crisis the Tories the Tories have created, the sharks really are circling in the water. Nana Akua of GB News seems to be one of those plugging its privatisation, along with broadcaster, stalker and jailbird Alex Belfield. And now they’ve been joined by Our Favourite Internet (non)Historian, Simon Webb. He put up a post this morning with the title ‘What’s So Bad About Privatising the NHS?’ It’s short, but I haven’t watched it on the grounds that I’d find it too infuriating. Webb is, of course, far right, and seems to get most of his views from the Torygraph, which has also been pushing this nonsense. As someone who takes history seriously, Webb should know what an immense difference the NHS and the welfare state made to the lives of ordinary Brits. I’ve blogged about it, citing my sources. But some of those I’ve used were by social worker types, the kind of people the Tory party has been trying to discredit for donkey’s years, and so someone like Webb would simply ignore them out of hand. But I’ve also used books from the time looking forward to the foundation of the NHS, as well as Jackie Davis’ and Ray Tallis’ excellent NHS – SOS. In contrast to what the privatisers will tell you, private healthcare is not more efficient. It’s less. Private hospitals are smaller, and in order to make a profit private healthcare largely ignores the long-term sick in order to concentrate on people who are mostly well. When private healthcare companies have taken over doctors’ surgeries in this country, they’ve closed down those they consider unprofitable, leaving thousands without a doctor. Also, private healthcare spends a large proportion of their running costs on administration, so as a consequence these costs have risen in the NHS as a consequence of its privatisation.

At the moment there seems to be a trend among the political class to be looking at the continental healthcare systems, where medical costs are paid by a mixture of state and private health insurance. But this also neglects the simple fact that these countries also spend much more on their healthcare generally than we do. The privatisation of the NHS won’t improve healthcare, but it will give private healthcare firms the support of the state sector, which is what they want.

And it seems to me that what the Tories really want is a completely private healthcare system, funded by private health insurance, like America. And that really would be disastrous. Except for their corporate friends, of course, who would get all those great profits.

A few years ago I wrote a book and a pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. Here’s their description. The pamphlets are available from me, if you want one, while the book’s available from Lulu.

Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.

The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.

Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.

This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.

Here’s the video I made years ago for my book against the privatisation of the health service.

I also put up this video, which only four people have watched, asking people to vote Labour to defend the NHS. I hope people will, as some Labour MPs will defend it. But I’m not at all sure about Starmer.